Brand-owner companies (customers) such as large consumer-packaged goods companies continue to increasingly outsource portions of their logistics and manufacturing activities to specialized contractors that are able to lower costs and add value to the supply-chain of the brand-owners.
These brand-owner customers often use various contractors to provide these contract services as contractors with aptitude or abilities in one service often lack aptitude in one or more others. For example, contractors who handle logistics or capacity planning lack aptitude with respect to manufacturing aspects of the customer's outsourced business. Handling both services increases business complexity for the contractor. This may be, for example, because they are at the end of the brand-owner's supply chain and have little control or influence over the lead times, and delivery dates of the products they must manufacture with, and deliver.
Challenges of this business are further heightened because of the nature of modern consumer markets and brand-owner sales strategies. The result are services, such as manufacturing projects that may be highly variable, may have very short production run durations (sometimes just a few hours), and may be so complex that they require extensive manual labor. These contractors may need to meet all these requirements and pressures while maintaining high throughput, and meeting rigorous quality and compliance standards.
There thus remains a need for systems and methods that help handle these and other challenges for customers, and the contractors that serve them, with lower cost, less time, greater accuracy, and higher levels of quality.